There are still two weeks until the release of the first installment of Lionsgate’s “The Hunger Games,” but box office soothsayers are already predicting the movie will handily shatter records. An opening weekend in excess of $100 million—“is pretty much in the bag,” says one movie executive who has seen tracking reports on the film. That milestone has been hit only once in the historically sluggish month of March by “Alice in Wonderland,” which brought in $116 million when it opened in 2010.

Today’s Wall Street Journal cites a March 4 tracking report—which studios closely watch to monitor interest in upcoming movies—that shows 48% of young men and 73% of young women had “definite” interest in seeing “The Hunger Games.” (Compare that to “John Carter,” Disney’s $250 million sci-fi epic—opening today—which shows only 34% of young males and 22% of young females expressing “definite” interest.)

And the appetite for “The Hunger Games” among young men continues to rise: As of March 7, a whopping 55% of guys under 25 said they would be “definitely” interested in seeing the movie, which stars the sultry actress Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old girl who has been called upon to compete in a brutal televised death match against 23 other teens.

Producer Nina Jacobson, who optioned Suzanne Collins’s best-selling young adult trilogy in 2009, is a little freaked out by the lofty predictions, and said she wished people would just focus on the movie. “I really worry about people jinxing us,” she said in an interview. “As a movie, it should be able to exist on its own terms.”

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